Jeremiah 51:58

Thus saith the LORD of hosts; The broad walls of Babylon shall be utterly broken, and her high gates shall be burned with fire; and the people shall labour in vain, and the folk in the fire, and they shall be weary. THE BROAD WALLS OF BABYLON - 87 feet wide (Rosenmuller); 50 cubits (Grotius). A chariot of 4 horses abreast could meet another on it without collision. The walls were 200 cubits high, and 485 stadia, or 60 miles, in extent. HER HIGH GATES - 100 in number, made of brass; 25 on each of the 4 sides, the city being square; between the gates were 250 towers. Berosus says triple walls encompassed the outer, and the same number the inner city. Cyrus caused the outer walls to be demolished. Taking the extent of the walls to be 365 stadia, as Diodorus states, it is said 200,000 men completed a stadium each day, so that the whole was completed in one year....

The Prophet again introduces God as the speaker, that what he said might obtain more attention from the Jews; and for this reason he subjoined a eulogy to the last verse, and said that the _king _spoke, _whose name is Jehovah of hosts _We have stated elsewhere what is the design of such expressions, even that men may rise above everything seen in the world when God’s power is mentioned, that they may not try to contain it in their own small measure. Then the Prophet now again repeats the name of God, that the Jews might receive with becoming reverence what he announced. And what he says is, _The wall of Babylon, _however _wide _it may be, _shall yet be surely demolished. _We have said that the walls were fifty feet wide, and the feet were indeed long, though Herodotus, as I have said, mentions cubits and not feet. The width, indeed, was such that four horses abreast meeting, could pass,...

1-58 The particulars of this prophecy are dispersed and interwoven, and the same things left and returned to again. Babylon is abundant in treasures, yet neither her waters nor her wealth shall secure her. Destruction comes when they did not think of it. Wherever we are, in the greatest depths, at the greatest distances, we are to remember the Lord our God; and in the times of the greatest fears and hopes, it is most needful to remember the Lord. The feeling excited by Babylon's fall is the same with the New Testament Babylon, Revelation 18:9; Revelation 18:19. The ruin of all who support idolatry, infidelity, and superstition, is needful for the revival of true godliness; and the threatening prophecies of Scripture yield comfort in this view. The great seat of antichristian tyranny, idolatry, and su...

Verse 58. _THE BROAD WALLS OF BABYLON_] Herodotus, who saw these walls, says, "The city was a regular square, each side of which was _one hundred and twenty_ stadia, the circumference _four hundred_ _and eighty_ stadia. It was surrounded by a wall _fifty_ cubits broad, and _two hundred_ cubits high; and each side had _twenty-five_ brazen gates." - _Herod_. lib. i. c. 178. Had not Cyrus resorted to _stratagem_, humanly speaking, he could not have taken this city. For the destruction of this wall and its very vestiges, Isaiah 13:19....

THE BROAD WALLS - Herodotus makes the breadth of the walls 85 English feet. BROKEN - See the margin. i. e., the ground beneath them shall be laid bare by their demolition. THE PEOPLE - Or, peoples. Jeremiah concludes his prophecy with a quotation from Habakkuk; applying the words to the stupendous works intended to make Babylon an eternal city, but which were to end in such early and utter disappointment....

EXPOSITION JEREMIAH 51:1 AGAINST THEM THAT DWELL IN THE MIDST OF THEM THAT RISE UP AGAINST ME. The Hebrew has _lēb-kāmai_, which is _Kasdim_, or _Chaldea, _written in the cypher called Athbash (see on Jeremiah 25:26); just as _Sheshach_ in Jeremiah 51:41 is equivalent to Babel. The question arises whether the prophet himself is responsible for this covert way of writing, or a scribe in later times (so Ewald). In favour of the former view it may be urged that Babylon and Chaldea receive symbolic names (though not in Athbash) in the connected chapter ...

THUS SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS,.... Because what follows might seem incredible ever to be effected; it is introduced with this preface, expressed by him who is the God of truth, and the Lord God omnipotent: THE BROAD WALLS OF BABYLON SHALL BE UTTERLY BROKEN; or rased up; the foundations of them, and the ground on which they stood made naked and bare, and open to public view; everyone of the walls, the inward and the outward, as Kimchi and Ben Melech interpret it. Curtius says s the wall of Babylon was thirty two feet broad, and that carriages might pass by each other without any danger. Herodotus t says it was fifty royal cubits broad, which were three fingers larger than the common measure; and both Strabo u and Diodorus Siculus w affirm, that two chariots drawn with four horses abreast might meet each other, and pass easily; and, according to Ctesias x, the breadth of the wall was large...

CHAPTER S 50-51 BABYLON These two final Chapter s contain a great prophecy concerning Babylon, her overthrow and doom. The fifty-first chapter closes with the statement “thus far are the words of Jeremiah.” There is a direct statement that Jeremiah wrote all these words. We find it at the close of Jeremiah 51:59. “Jeremiah wrote in a book all the evil that should come upon Babylon, even all these words that are written against Babylon.” It would be a brazen infidelity which says Jeremiah did not write all these words. Yet the almost universally accepted view of the critics is that these Chapter s cannot be the work of Jeremiah. The German infidel, Professor Eichhorn, the man who coined the phrase “higher criticism,” started this denial; Kuenen, Budde and others have followed in his steps. Others have modified this radical view and concede the possibility that Jeremiah may have b

JEREMIAH 50:1 TO JEREMIAH 51:58. BABYLON. This long and monotonous prophecy, which is without order or logical development of ideas, is largely a compilation from the prophetic writings of Jeremiah and others (_cf., e.g.,_ Jeremiah 50:41 ff., Jeremiah 51:15). It presupposes the destruction of Jerusalem, apparently as a remote rather than a recent event. Its idea of Babylon is that of a cruel tyrant to be punished by Yahweh, not that of a Divinely commissioned agent of Yahweh's wrath against Israel, as Jeremiah teaches. We are not at liberty to make it contemporaneous with such exilic writings as Isaiah 13, 40-55, because

WALLS. Some codices, with two early printed editions, Septuagint, and Vulgate, read "wall". PEOPLE. peoples. BE WEARY. faint....